If you are new to content curation here the ten, key fundamental steps you need to take to out yourself on the right course.

Content curation is not about saving time. It is about selecting, organizing, adding value and context, and finally about effectively presenting information on a specific topic to a selected group of people.

Here the ten key steps to take to effetively curate content, visualized by the great team at Scoop.it.

Nonetheless we are just at the beginning of a new era, in which content curation will be as important as search, there is already an apparent abundance of content curation tools of all kinds.

Robin Good's insight:

Evaluating which content curation tool to use may not be such an easy task. As you probably know there are literally hundreds of content curation tools out there, and many seem to be just clones of each other, leaving the novice curator in doubt as to what are the real differences between each one.

A good starting point to select anything is to know well what you are looking for and what you need it for, as your needs and objectives will shape the features and traits that your ideal tool will need to have.

In this article I have tried to simplify this job for you by listing 21 different things you may need your content curation tool to do, that you can use to check and compare the curation tools you have pre-identified.

For each selection criteria I have also added a few specific questions that should help you make even more sense of what you need to look for.

Elizabeth Weaver Engel and Jeff De Cagna are the authors of a small but very useful guide to Content Curation originally written for membership groups, and first published in November 2012.

The guide offers a good introduction to why content curation is so important, how it can help any organization and what are the key things to know about it for anyone who knows little or nothing about it.

From the original PDF guide, entitled "Attention Doesn't Scale: The Role of Content Curation in Membership Associations":

"Content curation provides a potential path to a new type of thought leadership, one that is more suited to a world where information is no longer the scarce resource. Focus is. Meaning is. Wisdom is.

But that type of support will require a signicant shift in our business models.

For decades, associations have been in the business of generating information.

Our challenge now is to transform ourselves into being in the business of sense-making, helping members distinguish what new information is most relevant and integrate that information into their mental categories, and meaning-making, helping them understand the implications of that new information for their worldviews."

Lots of good tips, references and relevant resources listed. Provides good foundational reference for any serious business reader.

With almost anyone now able to generate and publish content, finding relevance (signal to noise) is precoccupying knowledge workers everywhere. Sense-making, new media literacy and the ability to understand concepts across a wide range of disciplines are ctitical skills for the content curator in cutting through the noise to find that all important signal. Effective content curation will help us to focus and make sense of our complex and ambiguous world, to understand context and ultimately to make better decisons.

Flipboard, as you probably already know, is a great app (available on iOS and Android) which not only allows you to read and keep yourself updated on your favorite topics in a fresh and highly visual experience, but, since recently, it also offers you the ability to become a "curator" of whatever topic you are into.

Your job is simply to pick great stuff you stumble upon and to save it into the appropriate magazine you have created. It's not conceptually much different than clicking a Facebook "like" button and adding your comment, but we the added option of generating in the meanwhile a beautifully laid out digital magazine.

The secret here, to do something that it is of some value, it is to choose on a very specific "theme/topic" and to get picky about what you choose to publish in your magazine(s).

In this useful article Sue Waters collects and curates some of the best tips, video tutorials and techniques to make the best of your Flipboard curation experience in a step-by-step guide.

Flipboard (an App available for iOS and Android) is my favourite app for consuming and sharing inrormation. Relevence is improved by being able to choose the topics you want to follow, and liking or favouriting specific articles.

The recent addition of the Flipboard Editort now enables you to create and curate your own magazine, which you can share with others, or keep simply as a place for bookmarking.

In this article, Sue Waters provides a step by step guide on how to use and make the most of the Flipboard features.

Robin Good: If you are just about to start testing how effective a content curation tool like Scoop.it can be for building your own reputation and visibility in a specific interest area, this 10-step guide by Shirley Williams does provide some important information on how to start with the proper foot.

The guide is illustrated with many screenshots and it pinpoints the key items you need to be paying attention to when starting to curate a dedicated channel.

Hi students (and visitors). If you are having trouble with your profile photo changing every time that you post a new scoop, you can fix it by following these directions that a representative from Scoop.it sent me:
Indeed there's a setting to avoid that. Tell your students that on their Curate page, click on Manage>Customizations>untick "Last Post Image" box and click on Save.

There are almost no limits when creating books from Wikipedia content. A good book focuses on a certain topic and covers it as well as possible. A meaningful title helps other users to have the correct expectation regarding the content of a book.

Few people know that it is actually possible to curate Wikipedia content into custom print books or PDF / OpenDocument ebooks that contain exactly the content you want in the order you specify.

Once you are logged into Wikipedia you simply activate the Book Creator Tool and then, from that moment on, everytime you visit a Wikipedia page you can click and add it to your curated Wiki-Book.

There is also a dedicated wiki page where you can manage the pages you have collected and you can reorganized and sort them any way you want, eliminating the pages you don't need.

Unfortunately there is no integrated way to edit and further customize the content of those pages for your own use.

PDF versions are freely downloadable by anyone, print book versions are paid.

N.B.: The price for print books depends on the number of pages, starting with US$ 7.90 for books up to 100 pages. 10% of the gross sales price goes to the Wikimedia Foundation. Books are perfect bound, printed in the dimensions 8.5 inch x 5.5 inch (216 mm x 140 mm) and contain a table of contents, your chapters and articles, licensing information next to an index.

Few people know that it is actually possible to curate Wikipedia content into custom print books or PDF / OpenDocument ebooks that contain exactly the content you want in the order you specify.

Once you are logged into Wikipedia you simply activate the Book Creator Tool and then, from that moment on, everytime you visit a Wikipedia page you can click and add it to your curated Wiki-Book.

There is also a dedicated wiki page where you can manage the pages you have collected and you can reorganized and sort them any way you want, eliminating the pages you don't need.

Unfortunately there is no integrated way to edit and further customize the content of those pages for your own use.

PDF versions are freely downloadable by anyone, print book versions are paid.

N.B.: The price for print books depends on the number of pages, starting with US$ 7.90 for books up to 100 pages. 10% of the gross sales price goes to the Wikimedia Foundation. Books are perfect bound, printed in the dimensions 8.5 inch x 5.5 inch (216 mm x 140 mm) and contain a table of contents, your chapters and articles, licensing information next to an index.

Even though Google has become very good at understanding and providing relevant results for many popular queries, many search users are getting lazy and taking those results as currency.

John Ball writes on Search Engine Land: "People don’t think, analyze, or really even understand how search works anymore. They just assume it will work and they’ll get the results they need.

This is a very real trend, and likely to continue."

And he goes on: "For example, consider Google Now — no searching required, just results you’re likely to need and can further refine. Also, consider Google Glass. Glass doesn’t even support advanced searching — it’s all short, to-the-point answers, likely based on the Knowledge Graph, which is rapidly expanding."

If you are a journalist, researcher or content curator, you are likely uninterested in such auto-selected results and prefer to dig, explore more and vet before drawing a conclusion.

To go beyond the surface of Google forcedly limited search spectrum, it is of great help to be able to use Google search modifiers. These are manual commands that you can insert in your search queries and that allow you to ask to Google to bring you the results you want in the way you want it.

If you are not familiar with these or have not been using them in a while, I do suggest to scan through them again as they can be real life-savers in many a situation.

Find out the basics of content curation including its definition, and how to perform successful content curation.

Robin Good's insight:

Good introductory article to content curation for startups: what it is, why and how to do it and what to focus on.

The advice is good as well as the few examples provided.

An excellent definition of content curators is also included: "Essentially, a content curator acts as a go-between publishers and readers. Think of them as personal trainers who not only tell you what to eat, but also deliver the best foods right to your doorstep."

Robin Good: A valuable resource for anyone interested in the creation, organization and preservation of digital collections for the humanities, is this curated selection of resources and citations made available by the DH Curation Guide.

"The DH Curation Guide is a compilation of articles that address aspects of data curation in the digital humanities.

The goal of the DH Curation Guide is to direct readers to trusted resources with enough context from expert editors and the other members of the research community to indicate to how these resources might help them with their own data curation challenges."

Robin Good: Kenneth Lange on his blog does really an excellent job of synthesizing the key things you need to pay attention to if you are starting to seriously consider "curation" as a content production format.

From trust to focus and infrequency, Mr Lange touches on all the very and most sensitive points a content curator should be sensitive too.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.